Foot contact-based gait motion style synthesis

Abstract

Gait motion is the most commonly used motion in computer animations and game industries, and gait styles can be different for each person or situation. Traditional character control methods cannot reflect these styles or do not allow users to directly edit the gait style as they want. In this paper, we present an online system for synthesizing the gait motion style of the full-body human character using a foot contact state. For the gait styles that can appear in one step, we defined the spatiotemporal foot contact parameters based on gait analysis. To control these parameters, the graphic interface was constructed in the form of a single footstep for users. Given the foot contact parameters via the interface, the system searches for the motions most similar to the current character’s state while satisfying this foot contact state among the animation data. By using the searched motions to create the next motion of the character, the continuous gait motion that naturally transitions to the motion intended by the users is synthesized. The user study on usability has demonstrated that users can intuitively handle our interface and the result animation is synthesized to match the user's intention.